Tag: colour

This is how I feel about my photography right now and it shows. I’ve had these two rolls of Fuji Superia 400 in my drawer for 9 months before I developed them and scanned today. Nine months! That’s a whole pregnancy right here. Why it took so long you wonder?

Well, no serious reasons to be honest. First my colour chemistry started failing and I didn’t want these rolls to come out wacky. So I had to order a new set. It took time to arrive, then it took time to mix it which literally happened yesterday.

All these steps don’t take months to complete but they did in my case because I wasn’t organised enough.

As a result, I have a practically expired film with signs of bad treatment: grain, washed-out colours etc. I don’t care that much about those esthetically but it just bums me out that all this fresh chemistry was used for some tired film to receive some subpar results. I’m disappointed not in the film but in myself.

I waste a lot of time doing things I shouldn’t be doing at the moment or at all. It may not be true for everyone but it is for me.

With so many things happening in life it’s almost a crime to waste time. Yet I find myself doing exactly that more often than I’d like.

Sometimes I sit down with the intention to write a post or publish a picture and an hour later I’ve not even started. Sure there is a reason for that but nevertheless I can’t forgive myself for such bad time management.

I’ve looked at the date of my previous post and it was more than two weeks ago. I don’t have any regular schedule, true. And maybe I shouldn’t beat myself up for this but as much as I want to be consistent with posting I don’t find a lot of time for thinking it through and then actually writing.

And I don’t blame my life, work and family, no. I blame myself for wasting too much time on small things that look harmless for productivity but turn out to be huge sinkholes.

It affected my photography too. I’ve previously praised film for bringing so much joy when I develop and then scan it and it’s all true. But because of “the lack of time” I don’t get to processing film lately. Newly developed pictures used to be a great motivation to post frequently but not having developed a roll for a month or maybe even more I’ve got nothing to write home about. Except for occasional digital stuff which seems easier to process and share.

Being an optimist as I am, I still hope this is just a phase. We all have these moments after all. The struggle is hard but acknowledging the problem is a step into the right direction.

One of my colleagues, having seen me with a film camera, brought his old Nikon F65 and gave me as a present. In a camera bag, I found an unexposed roll of Lucky film and decided to test the camera with this roll. As it hasn’t been refrigerated for a long time I expected it to be something completely different from what I’m used to seeing in my colour film. And oh boy different it was! As you can see below everything came out with this magenta colour tone, and some shots also have a kind of stripes across the frame. Thanks to modern technologies I can save those pictures a little bit in post processing, but anyway, that was fun.

This is how the images turned out.

And this is a processed frame.

More magenta!

My other roll in this batch was Fujifilm C200 and it turned out really good despite being an expired film as well. Now I don’t remember if I shot it as ISO 100 or at box speed, but I love the results. Check out some of them.

Getting ready

A safeguard safeguarding

Old, rusty but colourful

Iron people deserve pets too

The experiment with the Lucky film got me thinking about cross-processing slide film in C-41 chemistry. I think I might give it a go once I get my hands on some cheap colour slide. Until then I’ve got my b&w film and chemicals waiting so I’ll be back with more home developed stuff to share here. Cheers!